Coble: NASCAR hitting its stride entering 2000 season

ATLANTA -- Rusty Wallace won his only NASCAR Winston Cup Series championship in 1989, and with it came a staggering $2,247,950 in purses and bonuses.

Don

Coble

Ten years later, Jeff Burton won more than twice that amount -- $5,211,301 -- for finishing a distant fifth in the point standings.

The decade of the 1990s certainly was one of change for a sport that grew from its Southern roots into a national passion.

Bank accounts swelled, champions were crowned, cars got faster, mechanics turned into aeronautical engineers, ratings soared and Wall Street paid attention to every single lap. Each pass in each race in each season during the past decade was a building block for a series that's at full speed heading into the new millennium.

On the track, there were 309 official races in the last decade. There were 29 different winners and more than 300 million fans in the grandstands.

Off the track, there were new venues, expanded television coverage and growth that gave the sport the kind of financial and political clout that allowed it to stand toe-to-toe with the National Football League, the National Basketball Association and Major League Baseball.

From the season-opening Daytona 500 in 1990 to the 1999 season finale at the Atlanta Motor Speedway, there have been hundreds of developments that helped carve the sport's course into a new decade. But the most significant were:

1. Costs. Ten years ago, all you needed was $3 million to go racing. That's barely enough to stock a souvenir trailer now, much less field a competitive car. Sponsorships now cost about $8 million to $9 million a year, and the cost for those on the other side of the pavement -- the fans -- has soared as well. Ticket prices have tripled in the last decade, and many tracks now force fans to buy tickets to support races just to have the opportunity to attend a Winston Cup Series main event.

2. Television. Everyone agrees television did more to develop the stock car circuit into a major league event than anything else in NASCAR's 51-year history. The sanctioning body now will be paid handsomely for the popularity that television spawned with a new six-year contract worth $2.8 billion. Television rights will more than triple when Fox, NBC and TBS assume broadcast control of the sport in 2001. When NASCAR sold the rights for an average of $466.7 million a year last month, it meant stock car racing now trails only the NFL in television revenues.

3. Jeff Gordon. He came to the Winston Cup Series as a full-time driver in 1993 and has enjoyed unparalleled success. His 49 victories came in 223 career starts, giving him a victory in 22 percent of his starts. Richard Petty, the sport's all-time leader in victories, won 17 percent of his races. Gordon won three championships and has never been worse than eighth in the final point standings since 1994. But even more impressive is his ability to win money. In just seven full seasons, Gordon has made almost $33 million. That's more than Petty, David Pearson, Bobby Allison and Cale Yarborough combined. Those four, by the way, combined to win 14 championships and 472 races.

4. International Speedway Corp. and Speedway Motorsports Inc. The two companies that own and operate race tracks on the circuit were in a frenzy to buy up properties. ISC had the advantage in most bidding wars since its president was Bill France Jr. -- the same man who runs NASCAR. By the end of the decade, ISC owned the Daytona International Speedway, Talladega (Ala.) Superspeedway, Darlington (S.C.) Raceway, Watkins Glen (N.Y.) International, Phoenix International Raceway, Richmond International Raceway, Homestead-Miami Speedway, North Carolina Speedway, California Speedway and the Michigan Speedway. SMI had control of the Lowe's Motor Speedway at Charlotte, N.C., the Atlanta Motor Speedway, Las Vegas Motor Speedway, Sears Point (Calif.) Raceway, Bristol (Tenn.) Motor Speedway and the Texas Motor Speedway. The two companies have combined to control 25 of the sport's 34 races, leaving Dover Downs (Del.) International Speedway, Martinsville (Va.) Speedway, Pocono (Pa.) Raceway, New Hampshire International Speedway and the Indianapolis Motor Speedway as the only facilities that aren't part of the ISC-SMI power struggle.

5. Dale Earnhardt. He won four championships in the last decade and was every bit the fiery competitor at age 47 as he was during his championship season in 1990. He had three victories in 1999, including a sweep of both races at Talladega, Ala., and a memorable win at Bristol, Tenn., when he rear-ended Terry Labonte on the final lap to start a crash that allowed him to escape with the win.

6. The 1992 Hooters 500 at the Atlanta Motor Speedway. Three drivers -- Davey Allison, Bill Elliott and Alan Kulwicki -- came into the season finale within 40 points (eight finishing positions) of each other. Allison, who only needed to finish in the top six to clinch the title, crashed 75 laps short of the finish line. Elliott won the race, but Kulwicki finished second and earned five extra bonus points by leading the most laps to clinch the championship in the closest finish -- 10 points -- in NASCAR history. The race also closed out Richard Petty's career. He crashed early in the event, but returned in the closing laps with a dilapidated racer to end his storied 35-year career on the race track. Five months after the race, Kulwicki was killed in an airplane accident near Bristol, Tenn., and four months after that, Allison died from injuries suffered in a helicopter crash at Talladega, Ala.

7. The Brickyard. The NASCAR Winston Cup Series has the largest fan base of any motorsports organization in America and the Indianapolis Motor Speedway is the most fabled race track in the world. In 1994, the two powerhouses joined forces for what's now an annual event -- the Brickyard 400. Jeff Gordon won the inaugural event as stock cars quickly became a passion that rivaled IndyCar racing and its biggest race, the Indianapolis 500.

8. Bristol Motor Speedway. Don't be fooled by its size. At .533 miles, it's twice the size of a football field. But with 147,000 seats and 36-degree banking at both ends, it's easily the fan favorite of all the facilities on the circuit. The night race in August remains the toughest ticket to get of any race and many fans include their season tickets to Bristol in their wills.

9. Independent driver/owners. As the decade started, it was fashionable to own and drive for the same race team. Ricky Rudd did it, so did Lake Speed, Darrell Waltrip, Bill Elliott, Joe Nemechek, Kyle Petty, Geoffrey Bodine and Brett Bodine. By the end of the decade, only Elliott and Petty were still in business -- and neither one of them had won in more than four years. Rudd not only sold his team at the end of 1999, but his streak of at least one victory a year ended at 16 in the same year.

10. R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. Despite losing billions in tobacco-related lawsuits, the series sponsor has stood firm in its support of the NASCAR Winston Cup Series. R.J. Reynolds has presented more than $55 million in post-season awards and bonuses since 1971, including more than $8 million in 1999, counting the No Bull 5 bonuses. Series champion Dale Jarrett pocketed nearly $3 million in bonuses from Winston. His father, Ned Jarrett, only got $16,000 for winning his first NASCAR Championship in 1961.

Don Coble covers NASCAR and the NFL for the Morris News Service. E-mail him care of sports@onlineathens.com.